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This introductory chapter looks into the lack of critical attention of German discussions on the history of the Baroque, noting how Walter Benjamin's The Origin of the German Tragic Drama has in particular fallen into obscurity even in the already obscure field of Baroque studies. More pointedly, Benjamin was just one of the many scholars engaged in the debates about the Baroque that were conducted with particular intensity beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century and continuing on into the early part of the twentieth century. Hence this chapter initiates this book's efforts to rescue these discussions and Benjamin's role in them from the obscurity into which they have “faded” by providing a brief refresher of the history of the Baroque as well as the particular contexts that inform Benjamin's ideas of the Baroque and the text of his Tragic Drama book.

This chapter proposes a revised theory of allegory in baroque tragic drama. It rejects Walter Benjamin's contention in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) that the Trauerspiel or “tragic drama” is a demonstration of mourning and melancholy distinctly different from “tragedy” that triggers a response of mourning. Instead, it argues that “tragic drama” employs allegorical modes together with dramatic mimesis to create an experience of mourning. In challenging and expanding Benjamin's notions of the genre, the chapter examines John Ford's The Broken Heart (1629–1633), a tragedy that is replete with the accoutrements of death consistent with Benjamin's description of the Trauerspiel. Through a detailed reading of Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1684–1689), however, it also illustrates how the trappings of mourning are not essential to the form. Thus, the experience of tragic drama is aligned with seventeenth-century expectations about the pleasure of mourning.

Props are staged property: in them are revealed the preconditions of now dominant “patterns of production, consumption, and ownership.” This chapter cites Walter Benjamin’s recourse to props: literal props, particularly his discussion on staged objects in The Origin of German Tragic Drama; rhetorical props, the stakes of a certain rhetorical placement of the proper status of names against the proper status of things; and theoretical props, which refers to the dimensions of an expanded concept of props. It also cites Plato’s Cratylus in explaining the concept of Cratylism, which maintains the ideal of a fundamental fabrication of proper names and naming the properties of things accordingly.

This chapter addresses writings that range across Walter Benjamin’s œuvre to trace his engagements with gesturality beyond a directly Brechtian framework. In his 1934 essay “Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Benjamin argues that Kafka’s protagonists busy themselves with performing a lost or forgotten gestural script, so that their expressive corporeality remains unreadable. Gestural codes are deprived in the writings of Kafka of a commonly shared system of reference. But Kafka’s new, and, with Rilke, proliferating gestures, based as they are on an unexplainable yet unerring necessity, also exude an immanent grace: an inner logic that suggests a forward-looking directedness toward the as yet unknown. The chapter argues that this places them in the vicinity of the grace that Rivière finds in Nijinsky.